AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes, that’s my great-great-grandfather’s mistress. Lamont senior commissioned this statue of her. He wanted it to be so beautiful that his wife would never visit his grave. That way, he said, he’d have peace in the hereafter even if he couldn’t have it in this life.”
“Maybe his wife would have been nicer to him if he didn’t cheat on her with this sad lady here.”
Emerson brushed some moss from the edge of a large flat piece of marble at the base of the monument. “I need to move this stone,” he said.
Larry took one end and Emerson took the other. After a few moments of straining and pulling they were able to inch the stone back and expose a metal ring. Emerson tugged on the ring and the base of the monument dropped out, revealing a small fissure just large enough for a man to pass through.
“Meet us at the designated spot,” Emerson said to Larry.
“I’ll be there,” Larry said. “
You can count on me. And I’ll put everything back in place here before I leave.”
Emerson hung his rucksack on one shoulder, pulled a penlight out of his pocket, and pointed it at a dark stone staircase that disappeared under the monument. “Follow me.”
“Down?”
“Of course.”
“No way! Are you insane? God knows what’s down there. Worms and spiders and dead people.”
“And?”
“And I don’t like any of those things.”
“Pity. They’re all rather interesting.”
“Not to me,” Riley said. “I’m staying aboveground.”
“?‘Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.’?”
“That’s Shakespeare, right?”
“So they would have you believe. My great-grandfather Lamont junior didn’t, however. He spent a good deal of the fortune he inherited trying to prove that Edward de Vere was the real author of those plays. That and alcoholism were Lamont junior’s main hobbies. He was an early version of what we would now call a conspiracy enthusiast. He believed, among other things, that the world was hollow and that the city of Atlantis still thrived there, controlled by the Freemasons who were infiltrating society and trying to take over the world.”
“In other words, he was a nut.”
“Perhaps. He also believed, against all rational thought—this was in 1910, mind you—that the government was going to prohibit alcohol consumption in all forty-six states. So he built this tunnel.”
“He was a bootlegger?”
“Not in the least. He merely wanted to maintain his supply. And to have an avenue of escape when the lizard people took over.”
“So this tunnel leads to your house?”
“Presumably. I’ve never actually used it. Care to find out? We’d be like urban explorers, only more subterranean.”
An odd choking sound escaped from his lips. Riley guessed it was a laugh.
“Is that you joking?” she asked.
“I have my lighter side.”
“Just warn me before you use it, okay? And why do you have to go to your house?”
“I have money there. And supplies. Since I’m fairly certain the house is being watched, we have to get in surreptitiously.”
“How about you go to the house and I wait here?”
